The French far-Right leader, Jean-Marie Le Pen, will stand trial for justifying the Nazi occupation of France after next year's presidential elections, a Paris court decided today.

The leader of the National Front party caused an outrage last year when he said that the German occupation of France during the Second World War was "not especially inhumane" and that any massacres had been "blunders" rather than deliberate.

Today a court in Paris confirmed that M Le Pen, who is 78, will stand trial at the beginning of June 2007, leaving him free to take part in presidential elections, where he is expected to stand as a nationalist, anti-immigrant candidate for the fifth time since 1981.

He is expected to face charges of conspiring to justify war crimes and to deny Nazi crimes against humanity, both violations of France's Holocaust denial legislation. If found guilty, he faces up to five years in prison and a €45,000 (£30,600) fine.

M Le Pen made the contentious remarks in an interview with Rivarol, a right-wing weekly magazine, last January. He said that the Gestapo worked, in the main, to protect the French population and was quoted saying: "In France, at least, the German occupation was not particularly inhumane, although there were some blunders, inevitable in a country of 550,000 sq km."

In the ensuing controversy, M Le Pen refused to apologise for his remarks, accusing the Government of trying to discredit him in the run-up to the referendum on the EU constitution.

"I note that if one compares the German occupation of France with the occupation in certain other European countries, then proportionately it is in France where it was the least painful," he said.

"It is scandalous that, 60 years after the war, one is not allowed to express oneself in a coherent and calm way on these subjects," he said.

M Le Pen has been convicted of making racist and anti-Semitic remarks at least six times in the past: in 1987 he described the Holocaust as "a detail of history".

But French legal experts have questioned whether he can be successfully prosecuted for the Rivarol interview because he was expressing an opinion rather than specifically denying that war crimes took place.

M Le Pen caused enormous unease in France in 2002, when, running on a vehemently anti-immigration agenda, he came second in the first round of the presidential election, defeating Lionel Jospin, the socialist candidate, into third place. He was comprehensively beaten by President Jacques Chirac in the final run-off.

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